A contrastive genre analysis of rhetorical moves in Korean and Indonesian TED talks

Abstract

TED Talks serve as a medium for disseminating knowledge and demonstrating academic presentation skills. Although move analysis has been applied to unpack TED Talk videos descriptively, empirical evidence on whether different languages affect variation in the communicative purposes of presentations remains underexplored. This study aims to identify and contrast rhetorical moves in Korean and Indonesian TED Talks, including their occurrences, salience, and patterns. Using a corpus-based contrastive genre analysis on 20 TED Talk videos (10 Korean, 10 Indonesian), a manual coding approach based on Chang and Huang’s (2015) move analysis framework was used. The contrastive approach, grounded in Connor’s Intercultural Rhetoric (IR) (2011), aimed to highlight the similarities and discrepancies in the rhetorical moves and the linguistic features that realize each move. The results show that Topic Introduction, Topic Development, and Acknowledgements/gratitude were obligatory in both languages. Similarities also appear in the Step-level, where engaging the audience in meta-level discussion, outlining structure, establishing authority, showing stance, and offering an explanation are not prioritized in both languages. Korean TED Talk speakers, however, prefer to greet the audience before kicking off their presentation and to make generalizations or to offer speculation in concluding their messages. Both communicative purposes were less evident among Indonesian speakers, who typically begin by developing the context of the topic. The findings highlight the influence of language on rhetorical structures and linguistic realization in communicating the purposes of the TED Talks presentation. This study suggests potential applications of contrastive genre analysis as a pedagogical method in academic speaking classrooms through exploring predetermined and curated teaching materials.